alt Hacker NewsI wish we could ban online advertisement, it wont eliminate the scams be certainly slow them down. Running such scams across the country will be a huge barrier to an extent its costs will deter the scammers. It will revive print media, folks will start reading more as a side effect. Given the limited slots available in news papers, only real business ads will have more reach. It will become difficult for companies to make grand claims, the ads in print media itself will be one's receipt. Not to mention, nothing to personalize, so lesser threat to ones privacy. Ad business has just commoditized our attention and thus our brains. Where the companies cant influence us, they manipulate us. All these can go away with just one ban.
I like the spirit, but in that spirit, I also think that data brokers, and any private business collecting personal data on people, should be highly illegal. If our governments represented us, they would have banned this long ago.
With respect to fully banning ads online, that would probably kill meta and force a major restructuring of Google. Probably hundreds of thousands of layoffs across the tech industry, so they unfortunately wouldn't do it.